that he feels himself to be so rich, that he is above the
meanness of pretending to knowledge which he has not, and Carlyle
does not pretend to have solved the great problems, but rather to
be an observer of their solution as it goes forward in the world.
I asked him at what religious development the concluding passage
in his piece in the Edinburgh Review upon German literature
(say five years ago), and some passages in the piece called
'Characteristics,' pointed. He replied that he was not competent
to state even to himself,--he waited rather to see. My own
feeling was that I had met with men of far less power who had got
greater insight into religious truth. He is, as you might guess
from his papers, the most catholic of philosophers; he forgives
and loves everybody, and wishes each to struggle on in his own
place and arrive at his own ends. But his respect for eminent
men, or rather his scale of eminence, is about the reverse of the
popular scale. Scott, Mackintosh, Jeffrey, Gibbon,--even Bacon,
--are no heroes of his; stranger yet, he hardly admires Socrates,
the glory of the Greek world; but Burns, and Samuel Johnson, and
Mirabeau, he said interested him, and I suppose whoever else has
given himself with all his heart to a leading instinct, and has
not calculated too much. But I cannot think of sketching even
his opinions, or repeating his conversations here. I will
cheerfully do it when you visit me here in America. He talks
finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and I loved him very much
at once. I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but I
could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in his wife,
and I hope he will not leave the moors; 't is so much better for
a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed
down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of
city society." *